AI Leaders Can't Get Along. So How Will They Keep Us Safe? — With Kevin Roose

Alex Kantrowitz (0:00)

Can an AI industry so prone to drama and infighting keep us safe from their technology's worse impulses? Let's talk about it with Kevin Roose right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then, I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial to go inside a large scale Gentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today we have a great conversation for you because Kevin Roose is here. He's the author of The AGI Chronicles, a book looking into what is going on within the AI Labs, what they're building, whether we should be afraid of it, and of course, the potential of this technology. Kevin, it's great to see you. Welcome to the show.

Kevin Roose (1:34)

Great to see you. What a cool setup you have here.

Alex Kantrowitz (1:37)

So I do want to say if you're on video, we're in a new set. This is our first time recording here at NASDAQ market site. They are new partners of ours and we're thrilled to be here.

Kevin Roose (1:47)

You got to get the big technology TV mugs.

Alex Kantrowitz (1:50)

Got to get the mug.

Kevin Roose (1:51)

That's the next step.

Alex Kantrowitz (1:51)

What we do have is your book. This is the book, The AGI Chronicles, The Inside Story of the Race to Create Artificial Superintelligence. You were ahead of the superintelligence on the subtitle.

Kevin Roose (2:01)

Yeah, Trump got the idea from me, actually. That's right. That's where he got it.

Alex Kantrowitz (2:07)

The thing that struck me, because I read the book. You can see, by the way, it looks red. I read it through and through, cover to cover.

The theme in the book, of course, is the building of AI, but it's also the drama. And everywhere you turn, the people who are building this very powerful technology cannot get along. There is Elon Musk's split from OpenAI, of course, Sam Altman getting fired by the people he worked extremely closely with, Anthropic not being able to stand working with the OpenAI folks. So they left and formed their own company.

There's within Google, the Google Brain versus DeepMind drama. There's Ilya Tsatskevich's botch attempt at steering OpenAI in a safe direction. I mean, we can keep going. Mira Murati couldn't lead OpenAI when she was there as the interim CEO for like five minutes. Every single lead character in this story seems prone to drama and politics. And yet, they are now telling us that the technology they're building is so dangerous, we need to protect ourselves from it. How can we possibly trust people who literally can't get it together on their own to rein in something that they say, and I think you believe might be smarter than humans?

Kevin Roose (3:27)

Yeah, it's a fascinating topic. I was not expecting this. When I went in to write the book, my goal was to tell the history of the last 10 years in AI, from the moment that the first large language models arrived on the scene to today.

I interviewed more than 150 people, and I was prepared to write a sober history of technology book that would be about the scientific breakthroughs and the technical achievements at the labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Then as I started talking to more people, I just realized, this is personal for them. They all hate each other. I had thought this was more like Coke and Pepsi, like a normal business rivalry, but it was actually more like Rome and Carthage. It was like these people cannot stand each other. Many of them used to work together. Ten years ago, Dario Amodei, Ilya Satskova, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk were all colleagues at OpenAI.

Now they are all working for different AI projects and many of them are at each other's throats. I wanted to understand how we got here and I don't think you can understand that story without understanding the backstories of the beefs between these people because so much of what we are seeing is a reflection of how viscerally these people mistrust and dislike each other. Even in things like how they feel about regulation and China and how they are racing toward this thing that all of them seem quite fearful of. I don't think we can trust that their motives are pure about whatever they say they are, like scientific achievement or safety because there is also this incredibly personal grudge aspect to it.